1999-05-05 04:00:00 PDT CONTRA COSTA -- Contra Costa's longest and perhaps costliest domestic violence case got a little stranger yesterday when the defendant, acting as his own attorney, called his ex-wife as a hostile witness.

Convicted murderer Gaylin Burleson pressed Jane Burleson, a Solano County deputy public defender who first reported him to police four years ago, to explain why she taped his allegedly threatening phone calls in March 1995.

"I was recording because I was afraid of you," she said calmly at a pretrial hearing in a Martinez courtroom. "I was recording because I was afraid of what you would do to me."

Prosecutors consider the more than 20 hours of audiotape the best evidence against Gaylin Burleson, 48, who is accused of attacking his then-wife while the couple lived in Martinez in 1995. She went into hiding a few months later after authorities learned he had allegedly hired a hit man to kill her.

The couple had met 10 years earlier while Jane Burleson was investigating a jailhouse death. Soon after Gaylin Burleson was paroled on robbery charges in 1993, he began beating her, she has said.

But far from conceding the damaging evidence, which allegedly includes recorded threats, racist comments and obscene remarks, Gaylin Burleson has mounted an all-out offensive. He has suggested that the tapes, made by his ex-wife using an inexpensive Panasonic recorder and stored for a time in a safe at the Solano County Public Defender's Office, were altered or edited.

Both Burlesons kept their composure in the courtroom yesterday, rarely addressing each other by name. Gaylin Burleson, dressed in jail clothing and wearing reading glasses, referred several times to his former wife as "ma'am" as he led her through several hours of laborious testimony.

At one point, Gaylin Burleson asked her to hook up the tape recorder to a phone to simulate the taping. Contra Costa Superior Court Judge Richard Flier allowed the demonstration over the objection of prosecutor Jon Yamaguchi.

Keeping a close eye on the proceedings were several bailiffs, seated only a few feet from where Gaylin Burleson was shackled to a chair. Also watching was court-appointed attorney Spencer Strellis, who, along with several other lawyers, has represented Gaylin Burleson. County officials refuse to say what the case has cost in public funds so far.

During the hearing, Jane Burleson said she suspected her ex-husband would at some point challenge the authenticity of the tapes, which were vouched for earlier in the day by a retired FBI expert.

But she had not originally intended the recordings to be used as evidence. "At the time, I began the recordings I believed you would kill me," she told the defendant. "I wanted people to know what happened."

Asked about a particular day in March 1995 when she made one of the recordings, Jane Burleson also recalled she had drafted a new will at her office and wrote a letter "saying I didn't want you executed if you killed me."